Rats and Gargoyles (31 page)

"Fuck!" The White Crow bent to check the broken
magus-mirror.

"Evelian wouldn’t let me in here, or I’d have
looked after it."

The White Crow straightened. Her head came up as
she turned a full circle, taking in neglected books and charts and lenses. The
slightly fat-blurred line of her chin made his throat constrict. She prodded a
heap of hand- scrawled messages resting on the table, tilting her head sideways
to read one.

"I must follow up some of these names. And talk to
Evelian about people she knows. Now . . ." She reached for the pamphlet he still
held out, and her fingers touched his hand. He grinned foolishly.

"Damned black letter printing . . . Let me see.
Liber ad Milites Templi de Laude Novae Militae.
‘In Praise of the New Knighthood’?"

"The Salomon men are behind the organized hunger-
strikes up at the Fane. They’ve almost stopped all building going on."

"Casaubon knows more about the Secret Orders than I
do. Whenever he’s been put now . . ." Her mouth quirked up. " ‘One crucial
hour’–and it turns out to be the Feast of Misrule. Lucas, don’t let anyone tell
you the gods have no sense of humor."

Lucas scratched under his open shirt at sweaty
hair. Bewildered, he said: "There won’t be much of a festival, with the sickness
and the strikes. What do you mean,
when
ever?"

She absently folded the black-letter pamphlet,
creasing it sharply, and put it in her pocket. "I don’t know for certain that
the Decan did do the same to him. Pox- rotten damned idiot that he is, why
didn’t he tell me what he was up to! I wonder if it’s too late to contact any
more of the College?"

She rested both fists against her mouth, tapping
them softly against her teeth, in the gesture of thought that brought Lucas’s
heart to his mouth. Then, still absently, she reached up to a shelf for a wooden
box, opened it, and took out three small talismans on chains.

Cut into tear-translucent moonstone: a sickle moon.
Into pearl: a nereid’s trident. And into black onyx: the cold Pole Star. Some of
the sweat-blotched red and white left her face as she put them around her neck.
She stretched, and all but fell into a sitting position on the
courtyard-window’s sill.

"That’s better. I’d forgotten what High Summer’s
like, here in the heart of the world . . ."

Lucas said softly: "Are you well?"

She shoved her spread fingers through her hair,
pushing it back from her face. The white at her temples gleamed. Resting with
her back against the jamb, one bare foot up on the sill, she smiled exhaustedly
up at Lucas.

"Yes, kind sir, I thank you for asking. But no,"
she said, the smile vanishing, "I’ll have to be moving again. Damned transport
would be out now, when I need to get across half the city. And I hate to break a
strike."

Lucas looked round at the star-charts curling on
the walls, the cracked mage-mirror table, the stacked volumes of Paracelsus,
Michael Meier, Basil Valentine. He walked to stand beside her, looking across
the top of her head and out into the courtyard. Yellow grass sprouted up between
the flagstones. A dark patch on the earth showed where Evelian irrigated the
cherry trees; morning light dappling their long oval leaves.

"Lady, you don’t need to be told how much I missed
you, or how I feared you dead. I even ordered poor Andaluz to make inquiries at
the Fane of the Thirty- Sixth Decan. My uncle is afraid of the Decans. He was
not admitted, in any case. But you had been allowed in . . ."

She raised her face, and he lost track of his
thoughts. He grinned: a rictus.

"I believe that I even missed your friend the Lord-
Architect, gods alone know why; but I find myself hoping that he’s well, as you
are."

The White Crow blinked as if thrusting away some
disturbing image. "I hope so, too."

The heat and the white light that came in at the
window dazzled Lucas. He rubbed his eyes.

"How could I forget what you said?
In this city,
the soul can die, too.
I don’t have to be a Kings’ Memory to remember that.
Lady, I’ve spent the days studying, learning, at the university; and all the
time wondering: has it happened again? Has someone else been taken by The
Spagyrus into the Fane and died–died, with no rebirth? And, if it had happened,
had it happened to you?"

Lucas, having rehearsed the conversation for a
dozen nights, lost the distinction between fact and fantasy, let the tips of his
fingers touch her fine hair that the sun made hot.

"No, and no, is the answer. Believe me, you’d know!
None of us would be here . . ." She slid off the windowsill to pace across the
room, remove her leather backpack from its chest, and begin to throw into it
gem-talismans, amulets, herbs, parchment and tiny bottles of strangely composed
inks.

"And I suppose I’d better take Cornelius . . ." She
slid a book into the satchel, paused, and added another. "And the
Ghâya."

"What did the Decan tell you?" Lucas touched her
shoulder as she passed him; the cloth of her shirt rough under his hand. "You
don’t seem changed, and you’ve spoken with god."

"You haven’t been in the heart of the world long
enough, Prince. You get used to living on god’s doorstep, and you get used to
some very practical divine intervention, when you live here. Hasn’t anyone told
you
this is Hell
?"

"I didn’t know what they meant."

"They might equally well have said
this is
Heaven.
The gods are here, on earth. Live here, and you live cheek-by-jowl
with what moves the living stars in their courses, and the sun, and the earth.
When you die, Prince, you’ll travel through the Night, and that’s the same Night
that exists within the Fane,
is
the Fane, grows with the Fane as it’s
built. Yes, I’ve spoken with god. Around here, that isn’t too unusual."

Lucas swallowed, wet his lips, touched by something
that still clung to her, a scent as of sun-hot courtyards and the silence that
stone breathes off under great heat.

"What will you do?"

The cinnamon-haired woman bent to pick up another
piece of chalk and tuck it into the side-pocket of her leather backpack.

"I don’t know what to do, except that it must be
something a Scholar-Soldier
might
do–so I take this." She touched her
pack, her sword. "And I don’t know where, or when; but since it’s The Spagyrus
who caused this I suspect it’s at the Fane, at noon or midnight. And, if I start
now, I might just be able to walk to the Fane-in-the-Twelfth-District by noon."

She tilted the mirror-table, catching sun from the
skylight. Reflections danced on her neck and the underside of her chin. Her
mouth twisted in a sideways smile.

"So much
magia
in the air! If I tried to use
this, I’d be as deafened and blinded as when the acolytes attacked that hall.
And it’s the one time I would have risked
magia
to go from here to there
without going between . . ."

Lucas frowned, thoughts racing. "What did the Decan
say you should do?"

"Heal. What else would a Master-Physician do? Of
course, it would help if I knew who I was meant to be healing. And why the Decan
wants them healed, instead of dying on their Fated day and passing through to
rebirth."

"You have a whole sick city to choose from."

"Oh, Prince." She straightened up from unfastening
her sword-harness and slung the rapier and scabbard across the mirror-table,
careless of further damage. "That was gruesome enough to come from the Lord-
Architect himself. You’re learning."

"Growing up," Lucas said acidly.

"I have never doubted you were grown." She
twinkled. Shifting her attention before Lucas could say any of what crowded on
his tongue, she added: "I am to heal, and Casaubon, I think, is to handle the
builders. The strike, I wonder, or the House of Salomon? She revealed nothing to
him, nothing to me. Only assured us that we’re in the right moment to act. And
She should know, being a Decan."

Lucas scowled. "But if the Decans know what will
happen in the future, then why—?"

The White Crow grinned. "They make the future. They
turn the Great Cycle of the Heavens: in the thirty- six divisions of Ten
Degrees.
But . .
. many of the Decans are in opposition to one another."

"With us as game-pieces."

"Oh, Prince, it’s real life; it isn’t a game."

She was a little fey, he thought; and still with
that air of the god-daemon about her, as if she could taste the power in her
mouth, feel it crackle through her like static. He noticed how she favored her
left hand, the fingers pierced and slightly swollen, pin-pricked with black
marks.

"White Crow, I can tell you something. You, or it
might be more useful to the Lord-Architect."

The savor of the knowledge had gone now, gone with
the fantasy of her gratitude when she should receive it. He concentrated only on
being as plain as possible.

"It started with my wanting to talk to Zari.
Knowing she’s alive. I haven’t seen her yet, but I have seen that priest she
went off with–the one that was supposed to have been killed, and now he’s a
Cardinal?"

"And?" She bowed her head, adjusting the sword-
harness so that she could buckle it about her waist, out of the way of the
backpack.

"Plessiez and my uncle are old friends. I’ve met
the Cardinal now. Between that and the Embassy files, I’m certain that he’s got
some very close connection with the House of Salomon, and with the woman that
wrote the pamphlet, the one who claims to be leader of the imperial human
dynasty."

She nodded slowly. "Yes. Lucas, I want you to do
something for me. Find your friend, the Kings’ Memory, Zar-bettu-zekigal. If
your uncle knows her present employer, you should be able to manage it somehow.
And if you can’t bring her to me, try to find the Lord- Architect and take her
to him. He’ll need to know everything he can about the House of Salomon."

"I’ll do it," the Prince of Candover said, "after
I’ve gone with you to the Fane. There are the acolytes. It’s too dangerous for
you to go on your own."

She opened her mouth, and he cut off the sharp
reply he saw in her eyes: "Scholar, yes; soldier, yes; but have you been trained
at the University of Crime?"

The White Crow’s eyebrows went up. "Well. You might
have a point there, prince."

He watched her for a few more minutes, packing with
the ease of practiced preparation. The half-grown fox- cubs whined from their
box.

"And if it happens again?" Lucas asked.

"It will. Once more. I have it on—" The White Crow paused. "On very good authority. I can tell
you the prophecy.
The Lord of Noon and Midnight will once more break the
circle of the living and the dying: in that one hour the Wheel of Three Hundred
and Sixty Degrees will fly apart.
What I want to know is, if the Decan of
Noon and Midnight knows what that will do, which he must know, then why do it?"

The White Crow broke off. Then: "She cares nothing
for plague. That was apparent. So if She doesn’t want me to heal the sick, who
am I to heal?"

"If The Spagyrus’s alchemy—"

"I know what you’re going to say. That that
wouldn’t be the healing of a body from sickness, but of a soul from The
Spagyrus’s black miracle: true death. I’m good," Master-Physician White Crow
said, with a smile that never reached her eyes. "I probably know more about
magia
than anyone now in the heart of the world, the Lord-Architect
included. And I’ve done necromancy in my time. But I wouldn’t even know how to
go about raising the truly dead."

Lucas at last identified the energy that moved her:
excitement, and a wild fear.

"She said there would be a moment to act. She did
not," the White Crow said, "tell us what we should do. I wish Casaubon were here
. . . but I can’t wait for him."

"I’m coming with you."

The woman made no objection, which at first pleased
and then badly frightened him. She hefted her pack onto her shoulders, thumbing
the straps into place, and walked past him towards the window as she did up the
buckles.

"There’s more," she said. "Something new."

The White Crow turned her head slightly, so that
she looked down into the courtyard and not at Lucas. Her fingers reached for the
warm wooden frieze interrupted by the window-frame: the carved skulls and
spades.

"Walking here this morning . . . I feel it every
time my foot touches the ground. There are focuses of ill and sickness, under
the city. Seven of them. Plague-
magia
, I think–corpse-relic necromancy.
Either cast while I was gone, or grown stronger in the meanwhile. And becoming
more violent with every minute that passes."

"Necromancy." Lucas swallowed, saliva suddenly
thick in his mouth. "Lady, I think I can tell you something about necromancy and
Cardinal-General Plessiez."

The heat of mid-morning stifled the small audience
chamber. Lengths of fine linen, dyed blue, shaded the great windows; and brown
Rat servants cranked the blades of a ceiling-fan. The Cardinal-General of Guiry
waved other servants aside as he strode down the azure carpet.

"Your Majesty." Plessiez knelt, with a flourish, on
the dais step of the circular bed. "I have news, best discussed confidentially."

The Rat-King sprawled on silk covers. One dictated
a letter to a secretary; another held out an arm for a young brown Rat page to
groom it; two more played with tarot dice, spilling the bright enameled cubes on
the cushions they lay against. One plump black Rats-King sat himself grooming
the knot of their eight tails.

"News?" The bony black Rats-King opened an eye. "So we would hope. It grows—"

"–late, Messire Cardinal," finished a fat brown
Rats-King, this morning next to the black. He snapped his fingers, dismissing
the servants to the five corners of the chamber. "Well?"